Digital Car User Interfaces development in the 80`s

As to see in the latest Concept cars like this, digital instrument clusters are getting to a standard like never before.
Working already some years in the automotive industry with car user interfaces, for me, it is still sometimes unbelievable how some technical innovations which are really in trend now — happened already a long time ago but didn`t result in a standard because of some logical or just market-related reasons.
One such feeling I got when I accidentally so the Subaru XT 1985.

The digital cockpit
Unbelievable how much details the cockpit of this car had back in 1985. An LCD display showing the tachometer, a boost indicator, temperature & fuel gauges presented as three-dimensional graphics tilting back out to the horizon.
This truly includes typical elements of the cockpits in the last 5–8 years showing e.g. assistance systems in modern cars.

The Cockpit was ergonomically genius because it was based on aircraft cockpits. The inside of the car had many aircraft-like features such as pod mounted lighting, climate control and wiper controls. The standard tilting-telescoping steering moved the instrument panel to keep it lined up with the steering column when tilting. The shifter was joystick-shaped and had a thumb trigger interlock and “on-demand” four-wheel drive button.
Turbo models featured a sort of artificial horizon orange backlit liquid crystal instrument display with the tachometer, boost indicator, temperature and fuel gauges seen as three-dimensional graphs tilting back out to the horizon. The aircraft cockpit approach reflected influences from Subaru’s parent company Fujy Heavy Industries, which also manufactured aircraft, such as the Fuji FA200 Aero Subaru.
Maybe it`s not that beautiful but it was a futuristic design and a digital instrument cluster back in 1985.

Innovation
This is very fascinating to me, especially when I see that many car manufacturers have done this in the 80`s but it wasn’t the mass, digital instrument clusters haven`t got an industry standard back then, but more in the last 10 years combined with the development of assistance systems like adaptive cruise control.

This shows once more, that innovation is not just an invention which is cool or looks cool, it includes much more aspects like user acceptance, time trends, market readiness, user readiness and of course market success.
